Roger Pielke Jr, The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke Jr: SERIES: What the media won't tell you about . . . hurricanes
In this short post, on the first day of the official Atlantic hurricane season 2022, I’ll share five points of consensus science on hurricanes that seem to be systematically ignored by the media, and especially by those on the climate beat.
1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its latest report, concluded that there remains “no consensus” on the relative role of human influences on Atlantic hurricane activity.
Here is what the IPCC says exactly:
“[T]here is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity, and particularly on which factor has dominated the observed increase (Ting et al., 2015) and it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic TC activity are outside the range of natural variability.”
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2. The IPCC has concluded that since 1900 there is “no trend in the frequency of USA landfall events.” This goes for all hurricanes and also for the strongest hurricanes, called major hurricanes.
Below are official data on continental U.S. hurricane landfalls, updated through 2021 from our recent paper. If you think that there have been a lot of major hurricanes in recent years, you’d be correct. One reason for the near-term increase in activity is an incredible unprecedented 11-year period from 2006-2017 during which no major hurricane made CONUS landfall.
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3. Continental U.S. landfalls are just a small proportion of all North Atlantic hurricanes, which in turn are just a small proportion of all global tropical cyclone activity. Since at least 1980, there are no clear trends in overall global hurricane and major hurricane activity.
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4. There are many characteristics of tropical cyclones that are under study and hypothesized to be potentially affected by human influences (including but not limited to greenhouse gas forcings). These include tropical cyclone rainfall intensity, speed of storm movement, latitude of storm formation, pace of intensification, length of seasonality and many more. You can easily find different studies and different scientists with contrasting views on the role of human influence on tropical cyclones, but at present, there is not a unified community consensus on these hypotheses, as summarized by the World Meteorological Organization in several recent expert assessments (see the end for links).
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5. Hurricanes are common, incredibly destructive and will always be with us. Even so, we have learned a lot about how to prepare and recover.
Read the rest here.
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